Homemade Salad Dressing Recipe

I eat a GIANT salad almost every day for lunch. It’s easy, I can prep it on Sundays for the entire week, and it helps me get in my daily quota of raw vegetables.

(By the way- did you know that it’s been found in research studies that those who eat at least 1 cup of raw vegetables a day live on average TWO YEARS LONGER?!?! WOW!)

Sometimes we use store bought dressing, and sometimes we make our own. I always prefer our homemade version to the store bought for two reasons: taste, and less artificial ingredients.

EarthboundFarms has a great post on Salad dressing 101 that you can access here. They even gave us this awesome graphic to give ideas for salad dressing ingredients:

One of the most common questions I’m asked is how I make our salad dressing. We prefer balsamic vinaigrette (well, if we were picking what we want solely based on taste and not on health impact, I would pick Ranch every time, but that would NOT be helpful in my pursuit of better health!)

Here’s how I make ours:
1/2 c. extra virgin olive oil (We use organic when we can afford to)

1/4 c. balsamic vinegar (the higher quality vinegar you use, the better it will be. This is NOT a high quality one, and I can tell in the taste)

1 squirt yellow mustard

1 tsp minced garlic

That’s it. I pour it in to a jar, put the lid on, and shake. That easy!

We keep it for up to 1 week in the refrigerator.

Here’s a copy of the label of store bought balsamic vinaigrette:

See that? 19 ingredients some of them ones that I have NO idea what they are. My version has 4 ingredients- all of which I know what they are. And it’s got more flavor than the store bought version. Double win.

Try it this week or experiment with flavors you prefer.

What’s your favorite dressing to use?